In high school I was friends with the stoners and the preps.  Even though I was a stubborn GDI (God Damned Independent) in college, I still managed to forge life long friendships with the bane of every good GDI’s existence, the Greeks.  As a mostly grown up I have great friends whose opinions and beliefs cover the entire political, moral, and religious spectrum.  Personally I now identify my political ideology as leaning towards full blown Libertarian yet I can still see the good and the bad with both the Republican and Democratic agendas.

Diplomacy by it’s very definition is the skill of maintaining a common ground. Staying grounded in the middle leads to the tempering of one’s passion which in turn can lead to a pretty dull and boring existence. When one uses the empathetic power of diplomacy to always skew any situation to a compromised state of being it makes it very difficult, at least in my own personal life, to make critical decisions. No matter what the pros and cons of a specific outcome may be, my mind finds a way to always level the debate to a draw.

In lay terms, I simply can’t make up my mind.

“I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.” – Mark Twain 

No decision is cut and dried. No options are black and white. More often the simple act of making a decision can turn into a dark and torturous adventure into the recesses of my mind.

I’ve always prided myself in being intelligent enough to see both sides of an argument. I always felt that being able to step back and calmly weigh both sides of an issue and then find the middle ground was one of my greatest characteristics. Now I’m beginning to think that it may just be my greatest character flaw.